Cultural Influences on Design Thinking Processes and Outcomes

PI: Professor Pamela Hinds

Abstract

We propose to investigate the relationship between culture and design thinking. We broadly conceptualize culture as attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors shared by a group of people and propose to explore the relationship between national, disciplinary, and corporate culture and creative design innovation. We plan a detailed ethnographic study of designers in diverse countries and companies that would leverage a tight collaboration within a cross-national team of researchers from Stanford and Potsdam as well as consulting researchers from China. Our results promise to characterize the practice associated with design thinking in multiple settings and stretch the current view of design thinking by incorporating a multicultural perspective. In an effort to influence design practice, scholarly research, and education, our deliverables range from scholarly papers, to workshops, to integration of our findings into design education.